1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a medicine discharge device of an automatic medicine packing machine, which is designed to discharge a medicine, fed from a medicine cassette based on a medical prescription, into a packing device.
2. Description of the Related Art
FIG. 1 is a schematic front view of a conventional automatic medicine packing machine. Referring to FIG. 1, the conventional automatic medicine packing machine includes a body 100, a plurality of medicine cassettes 110 arranged in an upper region of the body 100, each of which is mounted on a medicine cassette mount and is configured to store a medicine, such as various sizes and shapes of tablets, capsules, etc., and a hopper 130 arranged in a lower region of the body 100 to collect the medicine dropped from the medicine cassettes 110. In addition, the conventional automatic medicine packing machine includes a printing device 140 to print a variety of information on a paper surface of a packing pouch used to pack the medicine, and a packing device 150 to pack the medicine, collected by the hopper 130, into the packing pouch.
In the above described conventional automatic medicine packing machine, each of the medicine cassettes includes a medicine cassette body in which a medicine, such as various sizes and shapes of tablets, capsules, etc., is stored, and a division block rotatably provided in the cassette body to allow the medicine to be individually discharged from the cassette body. To realize rotational driving of the division block, a motor is mounted in the cassette mount that is used to support the cassette body.
The division block is formed in an outer peripheral surface thereof with a plurality of discharge grooves, so that the medicine received in the cassette body is discharged out of the cassette body by being moved along the discharge grooves. However, the discharge grooves employed in the conventional medicine cassette are shaped to allow movement of only a standard shape of medicine. Therefore, if a physician or a pharmacist prescribes a non-standard irregularly-shaped medicine, such as, e.g., a half tablet obtained by cutting a tablet into halves, it may be impossible for the conventional medicine cassette to accurately discharge the medicine.
For this reason, the conventional automatic medicine packing machine requires installation of an additional manual tray on which a person will manually dispense the prescribed irregularly-shaped medicine, such as a half tablet. This may disadvantageously increase time and efforts for a medicine packing operation. Moreover, manually handling a medicine may risk contamination of the medicine.